Down in southern California, Rep. Brad Sherman (D) easily won reelection over fellow Rep. Howard Berman (D) in a rare general election between two incumbents of the same party. Both candidates for Calfornia’s 30th district have been active on export control reform issues for the space industry in the past.

Florida Senate: Perhaps the biggest space-related congressional race is the one for the Senate in Florida, as Sen. Bill Nelson (D) seeks reelection against challenger Rep. Connie Mack IV (R). Nelson, along with Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX), played a key role in 2010 in crafting the human spaceflight policy compromise enacted in the NASA authorization act that year. However, with Hutchison not running for reelection, a Nelson defeat could leave that plan without a dedicated champion in the Senate—and perhaps Congress as a whole.

Recent polls, though, appear to show Nelson has a good chance of winning a third term. Those polls show Nelson with leads of between 3 and 13 percentage points; the two most recent give him six- and nine-point leads. (Another not included in the RCP list, by Reuters/Ipsos, gives Nelson a 12-point lead.)

Space has made a cameo appearance as an issue in the Nelson-Mack race. In an October 17 debate between the candidates, Nelson charged that Mack was “the only member of the Florida delegation that voted against a bill to help NASA.” That was a reference to the 2010 NASA authorization bill, which Mack was the only House member from Florida delegation to vote against it. (PolitiFact recently investigated Nelson’s claim and found it “mostly true”, confirming the voting record but noting that a vote against the bill wasn’t necessarily a vote against NASA.) Mack, son of former Florida Sen. Connie Mack III and great-grandson of Hall of Fame baseball manager Connie Mack, doesn’t specifically touch upon space on the issues section of his website. Nelson, meanwhile, identifies “maintaining a robust space program” as one of his priorities on his campaign website.

Texas 14th Congressional District: One of the few competitive House races in Texas is the seat being vacated by Rep. Ron Paul (R). The Democratic candidate is a familiar name in the space community: Nick Lampson, who in two previous stints in Congress represented districts that included the Johnson Space Center, and served on the House Science Committee’s space subcommittee. (The 14th district does not include JSC proper but, in the latest redistricting, does incorporate much of the area immediately south of the center.) Lampson is running against Republican Randy Weber, a member of the state legislature.

Polling data for this race is hard to find, although one mid-October poll gave Weber a three-point lead over Lampson. However, Lampson has won several key endorsements, including, last week, from the Houston Chronicle. Lampson, on his campaign website, devotes a section to NASA, calling for “robust funding” for the agency and continued support for human spaceflight, “including full utilization of the ISS through partnerships with academia and industry.” Weber’s site makes no mention of space among the various issues he discusses there.

California 10th Congressional District: This central California district is not a hotbed of space activity, but it has attracted attention because of one of the candidates: former NASA astronaut Jose Hernández, a Democrat running against Republican incumbent Rep. Jeff Denham. Polling data is again scarce for this district: a poll in September by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee gave Hernández a two-point lead over Denham, 46% to 44%. (Denham handily beat Hernández in the open primary in the district in June, but with several other candidates on the ballot.) While neither candidate talks about space (other than a passing reference, in a historical context, by Hernández on technology investment), Hernández is perhaps the only candidate whose campaign logo resembles a shuttle mission patch.

California 30th Congressional District: Thanks to redistricting and California’s open primary system, this race is unusual in that it’s pitting two Democratic incumbents agains each other: Reps. Howard Berman and Brad Sherman. Both have been active in the past on export control reform to aid the space industry, including Berman’s co-sponsorship of an amendment to the House defense authorization bill approved in May. In a bruising (nearly literally) campaign, though, Sherman has held the lead in polls, including a 13-point lead in a September poll, although the race may be tightening.

Posey said that a Romney Administration would support the Kennedy Space Center. “Kennedy Space Center and Cape Kennedy [sic] are the epicenter of space,” he said. “I don’t think Romney/Ryan would do anything to undermine it.” However, as the Romney campaign has indicated previously, Posey said that support would not come in the form of additional NASA funding. “I think the NASA budget right now, NASA could live with, if their mission was clearly defined, if they weren’t involved in so many different things, in so many different directions,” he said.

Posey spent part of the interview talking about some of his own views, including his support for the Space Leadership Act introduced in Congress in September. Posey doesn’t say if a Romney Administration would support the bill, but drops a hint that it might. “There have been over two dozen programs started and stopped before they reached their goals in the last few decades,” Posey said, recounting one of the selling points for the legislation. “I think Romney and Ryan, both, anticipate changing that.”

Posey dropped one interesting item at the end. He directed his staff, he said, to look “specifically at space’s impact on Congressman Ryan’s district, and there’s space industry right in his district.” (Ryan represents a district in southeast Wisconsin not typically identified as an aerospace hotbed.) It was unclear from the interview if Posey provided that analysis unsolicited to the Republican vice presidential candidate, or if it had been requested by the campaign.

34. President Obama set a bold new plan for the future of NASA space exploration, using the skill and ability of the private sector for short trips to the International Space Station, while building a new vehicle for exploration of distant space, and doing everything in his power to support the economy on Florida’s Space Coast.

Of course, that “new vehicle for exploration of distant space”—a reference, presumably to the Orion spacecraft and Space Launch System launch vehicle—hasn’t been built yet, and that choice of words—“distant space”—sounds off, as if someone in Chicago perhaps confused it with the more commonly used “deep space.” And those on the Space Coast might be wishing the president had done more, and/or different things, to help their economy. But it’s interesting space even made the list at all.

Neither op-ed breaks new ground, largely reiterating past arguments for and against the Obama Administration’s space policies. Cernan argues that Obama broke a promise from the 2008 campaign to fund Constellation, resulting in thousands of lost jobs at the Kennedy Space Center. “Not only is he willing to sacrifice the United States’ pre-eminence in space exploration, but he seems unconcerned that our economic and national security might falter as well,” Cernan writes of Obama. Romney would make sure the US “continues to lead the world” in space exploration, making points taken directly from the campaign’s space policy white paper (Cernan serves on the campaign’s space policy advisory group.)

“The president has been criticized for not being clear about his priorities when it comes to space policy, but I see things differently,” Kelly counters in his piece, saying that the president has made “clear decisions” on space issues, including some that benefit those on the Space Coast. He cites in particular the decision to continue development of Orion and build the Space Launch System, as well as commercial cargo and crew efforts, specifically mentioning SpaceX’s recent accomplishments. Kelly previously made the case for the administration’s space policy in a Sentinel op-ed in May, where he described how he became a covert to that policy after initially being skeptical of the plan to cancel Constellation.

Op-eds like these raise a question: are they really that useful? At this late stage of the campaign, it’s hard to imagine that there are that many undecided voters, let alone those who would be swayed by commentaries on space policy, even in a region like the Space Coast. These pieces appear, at best, to reinforce existing views in favor of or against a candidate (the handful of comments that Cernan’s Sentinel piece has attracted in the day since its publication have largely been critical of it); at worst, they devolve to “my astronaut is better than your astronaut” arguments.

There’s also a related question of just how much weight people should give to the views of former astronauts, who, after all, made the names as astronauts based on their ability to fly and operate spacecraft, and not on their policy expertise. Both commentaries focus almost exclusively on human spaceflight topics (Cernan mentions national security as well as science missions, but only in passing, using the campaign’s language): understandable given their experiences, and the audiences in and around Kennedy Space Center, but incomplete from a broader policy perspective.

In a line that bodes well for the Space Coast, he writes: “Government is generally not the source of new ideas, although innovations from NASA and the military have provided frequent exceptions.”

On space, Romney’s views match Obama’s plan for privatizing flights to the International Space Station and refocusing NASA on interplanetary missions. That approach led to a painful downsizing at Kennedy Space Center, but it also prodded our local space industry to become more competitive and productive.

Later in the editorial, though, the newspaper appeared disappointed that Obama had not carried out some of the promises he made in the 2008 campaign that led the paper to endorse him them, including one to “continue NASA’s moon-exploration program.”

In the Florida Senate race, where Sen. Bill Nelson (D) is running for reelection against Rep. Connie Mack IV (R), Florida Today endorses Nelson, citing in part his record on space in the last few years, including lobbying for passage of the 2010 NASA Authorization Act:

For the Space Coast, Nelson successfully fought to reinstate a major rocket program for missions to the moon and Mars after the White House unceremoniously killed the Constellation program. Nelson practically designed the Space Launch System rocket himself, found the money for it and took the unusual step of visiting the U.S. House to twist arms and win passage.

Nelson got all four votes of the paper’s editorial board on the topic of space.

And in the House race for the district that now covers most of the Space Coast, Florida Today endorsed incumbent Rep. Bill Posey (R) over Shannon Roberts (D) and Richard Gillmor (I). The paper noted Posey’s work on legislation “that could benefit NASA and Brevard’s space industry”:

For example, Posey passed legislation that will open military launch sites to private space contractors the same way Kennedy Space Center has opened to SpaceX and others. He has introduced a bill that would begin stable, multiyear contracts for NASA and shield its director from politics. And he and his staff regularly visit representatives from other parts of the country to pitch the commercial and security value of the U.S. space program.

However, the paper actually preferred Roberts’s position on space, “which she considers an investment in science and technical innovation — not pursuit of the “military high ground,” as Posey sees it,” the paper noted. “Roberts, a retired NASA manager, expressed stronger support for commercializing flights to low Earth orbit, a strategy already making Brevard’s economy more resilient.” Posey and Roberts split the four votes of the paper’s editorial board.

Kohlenberger then criticizes the rhetoric and plans (or, he argues, lack thereof) from the Romney campaign. “Romney’s central point seems to be an echo of the erroneous claim that NASA and America’s space program are adrift with no clear strategy or goals,” he writes. The Romney campaign’s “rather petite space plan”, he notes, claims the US doesn’t have any plans for putting astronauts into orbit “but then goes on to embrace the president’s own plans for partnering with U.S. industry to do just that,” a reference to the language in support of commercialization in the Romney space white paper.

Not so fast, counter Scott Pace and Eric Anderson in their own op-ed. The two, members of Romney’s space policy advisory group, repeat many of the points made in last month’s white paper. “President Barack Obama has put us on a path that cedes our global position as the unequivocal leader in space,” they claim. After reviewing the key points of the Romney white paper, they conclude, “Mitt Romney will ensure that we have a space program worthy of a great nation.”

One change in the op-ed versus the white paper is the latter’s claim, highlighted by Kohlenberger, that “For the first time since the dawn of the Space Age, the United States has no clear plan for putting its own astronauts into space.” Instead, Pace and Anderson write, “For the first time since the dawn of the Space Age, America has chosen to forgo its own capabilities for putting astronauts into space and instead relies on the Russians.” They argue that while shuttle’s impending retirement was known when Obama took office, “the earliest that Americans will again ride American rockets into space is 2016 — a stretch longer than the one between President John F. Kennedy’s famous speech and the first steps on the Moon.”

If, in fact, commercial providers start crewed launches in 2016 (which may be a stretch goal, as NASA is planning on having such vehicles available in 2017), the time between Obama’s 2009 inauguration and that first flight would be less than eight years, compared to slightly more than eight years between JFK’s May 1961 speech Apollo 11’s July 1969 landing. However, the actual gap in US human spaceflight access, measured from the final shuttle mission in July 2011, would be on the order of five years, less than the gap between Apollo-Soyuz and STS-1.

That single-minded focus on Mars is a departure from his 2008 campaign, which didn’t explicitly call out human exploration of Mars as a top goal in its space policy white paper, focusing instead on continuing Constellation, maximizing utilization of the ISS, and ensuring “that space exploration is top priority and that the U.S. remains a leader”. The Romney campaign has also not formally endorsed a human mission to Mars in its campaign statements to date. President Obama, though, did make sending human to Mars (or, at least, in orbit around Mars) by the mid-2030s once of his goals for NASA in his April 2010 speech at the Kennedy Space Center.